College athletics have become more and more popular and advertised.   The athletes should be getting paid and profiting off of the rigorous hours of time and work they put into these programs. In any college sport, the maximum amount of time to be practicing is four hours a day, and twenty hours a week. This max amount of time is similar to job hours that many college students work per week to make money. Factoring in the amount of time these athletes are putting in, as well as the millions of dollars big programs receive in funding, you would come to agree that these college athletes should be profiting as well.

The  article, “Are College Athletes Overworked?” by Kerry Reagan, gives a better understanding of just how much time these athletes are putting in. This article explains that “In season, athletes are not supposed to spend more than twenty hours participating in their designated sport. However, D1 football, men and women’s basketball, and baseball players spend about forty hours a week on athletic activities.”

This is slightly above the average American’s hours of work per week which sits at 38.7 hours. That is solely set aside for sports, when class work and studying must also be factored in.

The article “Student Study Time Matters” by Vicki Nelson, explains that “a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class and should be spending 30 hours on work outside of class, or 45 hours/week total.” Totaling all of that together, the hours spent on school and sports per week are around seventy hours give or take. There are only 168 hours in the whole week and those 70 hours does not include downtime/sleeping. The average person is supposed to get seven or more hours of sleep per night, which adds another 49 hours in which this student athlete would not have time to get a job or a source of income. We are up to 119 hours out of the 168 that a college athlete has used up on school, their sport and sleeping. That is over 70% of the week. If they are putting in the time for their sport as well as supporting an environment that makes a large deal of money for the school, they should be profiting as well, even if it is a small amount. Any sum of money would be better than what they are getting now, which is nothing. This is not always true when there are certain exceptions such as scholarships that do provide students’ tuition money, but a very small percentage of student athletes receive a large amount of money or any at all.

At these big schools especially, according to the article, “Big Ten Media Rights: Conference’s TV Deal is Richest in College Sports History”, the Big Ten collects the money they make from television, bowl payouts, and the Big Ten Network:  “They are receiving around 60 million per school.” This article also goes on to explain how many resources and funds are provided for these sports and how big of an industry it has become. It would only seem fair to give these athletes a small cut out of this very large amount of money considering their outstanding performance is what the school depends on to make this money through the advertising and popularity surrounding these teams.